Amazing Grace: The movie icon look for 2010

From a major V&A exhibition to the look of Mad Men's leading ladies, Grace Kelly is everywhere this spring. Actor
Rosamund Pike pulls on her white gloves and travels to Monaco to recreate her timeless style

The chemistry of being a movie star is about maintaining the perfect temperature. From the screen, you need to radiate enough heat to keep the audience's pulses racing, to invite a little fantasy, yet maintain enough coolness to remind them that a fantasy is all it is. Too much heat and they think you're cheap; too little and they don't look long enough to care. The trick is to look approachable without being available.

Grace Kelly, if we can use a modern phrase for a timeless gal, had this nailed. As a gorgeous blonde starlet, she marked herself out as different by way of her cool, somewhat distant air. The director Fred Zinnemann remarked of his first meeting with a young, unknown Kelly in 1951, "Nobody came to see me before wearing white gloves." Four years later, when Time magazine ran a cover story on Kelly, it was entitled The Girl In White Gloves.

Half a century later, there is something of the Kelly lineage in Rosamund Pike, the young actor with the cool-drink-of-water good looks who gamely agreed to model this season's take on the Grace Kelly look in Monaco for us. Pike wrote in Vogue last year about the experience of playing the adorable, childlike, Monroe-esque character of Helen in An Education – a comic role she played to delicious perfection – and how differently cast and crew related to her, compared with her experiences playing more arch, aloof blondes. "Kelly put a lot of space around her, which enabled audiences to project a lot," is how Pike pegs the Kelly magic. She's right: there's something self-possessed about Kelly, which seems subtly to reinforce her personal space. Those white gloves remind us to keep at arm's length. Mention iciness, however – Vogue, after all, dubbed Kelly "as remote as a Snow Queen" – and Pike comes to her defence: "I don't see icy at all. No. Icy suggests hardness. She had a way of being untouchable without being cold. She was intensely natural and fresh and feminine. What do I see? Grace, I suppose, as in the noun."

Almost more iconic, though, than the pearls and satin is the casual Grace: the capri pants, headscarf and sunglasses she wore in 1955's To Catch A Thief, and the Pringle twinsets she wore on honeymoon with Hermès scarves. Clare Waight Keller, the current designer at Pringle, says Kelly's beauty "suddenly made this classic combination highly fashionable and desirable". The twinset has been an icon of the Pringle brand ever since. The chic, casual, Riviera style was a perfect marriage of the lean, spare aesthetic of upper-class American style with French chic. It was while filming To Catch A Thief that Kelly and Head decamped to Paris for a shopping trip, ending up in Hermès "like two girls in an ice-cream shop", as Head put it, and a love affair with another brand was born.

Kelly's biggest fashion moment came with the culmination of her romance with Prince Rainier on 19 April 1956, when 600 guests and 30 million television viewers watched her become Her Serene Highness. She wore a gown by Helen Rose, made of 450 yards of Brussels rose-point lace and silk-faille and a diamond necklace from the bounteous Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery box the Prince had given her as an engagement present. Later, Kelly said of the day that she found it "kind of hard to describe the frenzy... it was nightmarish, really", while her husband recalled, "Grace kept saying, 'Maybe we should run off to a small chapel somewhere in the mountains and finish getting married there.' I wish we had, because there was no way either she or I could really enjoy what happened."

That neither enjoyed the day has not served to interfere with the myth it helped create. A new book about Kelly, published next month, Cindy de la Hoz's A Touch Of Grace, captures the commercial appeal of the Kelly look with its subtitle: How To Be A Princess, The Grace Kelly Way. Shortly after the wedding, when photographers were around, Kelly took to shielding her growing stomach with her Hermès saddlebag, giving this accessory a new prominence – a prominence not lost on Hermès. Nine months and four days after her marriage, Kelly gave birth to her first child, Princess Caroline. The Hermès Kelly handbag was born shortly after.

Head said of her, "I have never worked with anybody who had a more intelligent grasp of what we were doing." Keenly aware of the power of image and that elegance is as much about restraint as it is about flair, Kelly was deliberate about what she held back. She refused to divulge her measurements at a time when they were considered "standard data" for actors. (In this sense and in others, the rules have changed. Pike comes from a generation of actors who – however high their principles – place less store by high necklines.) Bud Fraker, the Paramount photographer, said, "The only time she gives me any trouble is when the proofs are ready. She kills all shots that show too much leg, too much cleavage, or soulful, sexy eyes." Alfred Hitchcock loved that she was as aware of maintaining her clear, inscrutable gaze as of her body language. "I always tell actors: don't use the face for nothing," he said. "Don't start scribbling over the piece of paper until we have something to write. We may need it later. Grace has this control. It's a rare thing for a girl at such an age."

As an actor, and as a princess, Kelly understood the necessity to play a role, but it frustrated her that her ability to guard her privacy was read as froideur. "I'm not an extrovert, but I'm not unfriendly either," she said. "I don't like to read that I'm cold and distant. I don't think I am." (As Pike says, "Kelly had a respect for formality. Sometimes people confuse formality with coldness.")

Kelly is everywhere this spring. The new Salvatore Ferragamo campaign draws on the atmosphere of To Catch A Thief, featuring the car used in the film; the hair, colours and gloves, channelled through Mad Men's Betty Draper, are filtering on to a high-street consciousness. Pike, meanwhile, has moved on to the title role in Hedda Gabler, a woman with "a husband, a house, a baby on the way: she's got what many women crave. But she's not happy. She wants freedom." What's wonderful about these all-time great roles, Pike says, is "how the character can be inhabited by all these different actors, all different women, but somehow the character remains timeless. The best characters are an inspiration, but they leave room for you to use your imagination. Which in a way, of course, is what Kelly did."

• Grace Kelly: Style Icon is at the V&A in London from 17 April to 26 September.

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